SEARCH FOR TRUTH IN TANGLED TALE

DEA suspends longtime informant, probes its own laxity

When Andrew Chambers was arrested on charges of soliciting a Houston
police officer posing as a prostitute, a federal drug agent posted his
bond.

Chambers failed to appear for any court hearings on the misdemeanor
charge, but Harris County prosecutors dismissed the case in 1998.

The Houston arrest is only one twist in the curious story of Chambers
- -- an informant who has been paid more than $2.2 million for his work
in nearly 300 federal drug cases, and who now is at the center of a
nationwide inquiry into findings that he repeatedly gave false
testimony about his own criminal record.

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration this month suspended Chambers
as an informant pending a review of his background. The agency also is
reviewing its own lax procedures for documenting and disclosing his
arrests and false testimony during much of his 16-year career.

"In our review thus far, Chambers has been arrested on about six
occasions, not including traffic offenses," said Terry Parham, chief
DEA spokesman. "He has not been convicted of a felony or any offense
involving honesty."

His arrests include two for solicitation of prostitution, one for
forgery, one for theft, one for a domestic assault and one for
impersonating a police officer. He apparently has been convicted on
only one of those, a Colorado prostitution case.

"In certain circumstances, the prosecutors and (DEA) case agents were
apparently unaware of the fact that Chambers had an arrest record,"
Parham said. "Chambers provided false testimony on the witness stand
about his arrest record on at least three occasions."

Informants typically are asked during their testimony to disclose
their backgrounds.

Defense attorneys whose clients have faced testimony from Chambers
have complained about him for years, and now contend that government
agents and attorneys have intentionally disregarded one of the tenets
of U.S. criminal law -- the requirement that prosecutors share with
defense lawyers evidence that might help the defendants.

These lawyers say that Chambers' pattern of misrepresenting his past
- -- and the government's repeated failure to disclose his complete
background -- may open the door to challenges in dozens of drug
convictions, especially those cases that lacked corroborating evidence.

The government acknowledged Chambers' record after a nearly three-year
legal battle that culminated last June when U.S. District Judge Gladys
Kessler of Washington, D.C., ordered the DEA to disclose Chambers'
full criminal history, specific criminal cases that he has worked and
the amount he was paid for his testimony.

She cited evidence "suggesting massive government misconduct."

In a Jan. 7 response to the order, the DEA didn't report Chambers'
Houston arrest, though the agency did acknowledge his guilty plea in a
1995 prostitution solicitation charge in Denver -- a case already
known to the defense attorneys challenging his credibility as a
government informant.

Attorney H. Dean Steward, who represents the plaintiff in the suit
that led to Kessler's order, contended in court papers filed last week
that the DEA response was insufficient. "It appears to have been
prepared to reveal only information plaintiff already has," Steward
wrote.

Steward's filing charged that the DEA may have attempted to edit or
conceal important aspects of Chambers' background.

Steward, a federal public defender in Santa Ana, Calif., has argued
that an affidavit by Chambers was crucial for the government to obtain
a wiretap that led to the arrest of his client, who was convicted in a
1996 shooting death in Las Vegas. The wiretap, he has maintained in
court filings, would not have been authorized if Chambers' record had
been disclosed.

The DEA also has not fulfilled other aspects of the June order,
including a requirement to list specific cases that Chambers has
worked, according to Steward's filing. Steward and other defense
attorneys are aware of only about a dozen cases, though Chambers has
testified that he gave testimony in about 50.

Among the known cases are several in which Chambers testified falsely
about his record -- possibly to enhance his credibility.

The DEA docked his pay at least once because of false testimony,
according to court records, but Chambers has not been charged with
perjury.

In one recent case, Chambers testified during a deposition last June
in Tampa, Fla., that he has been charged with a crime only once -- the
1995 Denver prostitution case.

Chambers offered an undercover police officer $20 for sex, and claimed
to be a DEA agent, according to an arrest report. He pleaded guilty to
soliciting a prostitute and paid $475 in fines and court costs.

"Chambers has lied under oath virtually every time he has been put on
the witness stand," Steward said in an April 1998 complaint to the
DEA's Office of Professional Responsibility, the agency's internal
affairs unit. "These lies are also significant and substantial. He
lies about his criminal history, his educational background, his
aliases, where he is from, and just about every personal detail you
could imagine."

"Chambers is a congenital liar," added Paul Grant, a Colorado
attorney. "The only compunction he has to minimize his lies is because
it can cost him money. But the reality is he very seldom has to testify."

That's because about 90 percent of all federal drug cases are
plea-bargained, Grant said. Defendants agree to plead guilty to lesser
charges because they fear tough, mandatory federal sentencing
guidelines if they're convicted at trial.

In her June order, Kessler condemned the government's secrecy about
Chambers' history.

"The public interest can only be served by the full disclosure of
Chambers' rap sheet (criminal record), about which he has frequently
testified, although not always truthfully," Kessler ruled. "Given the
compelling evidence the plaintiff has uncovered suggesting massive
government misconduct, the public interest in the disclosure of this
information far outweighs any privacy interest."

DEA agents and prosecutors, however, praise Chambers for his work in
more than 20 cities -- from Los Angeles to Miami, Houston to
Minneapolis -- which they say has led to the arrests of 445
defendants, and seizure of more than a ton of cocaine, $6 million in
assets and numerous weapons and motor vehicles.

He has been richly rewarded. The DEA alone has paid him more than $2.2
million, and he is believed to have received more than $1 million in
additional payments for his work with other law enforcement agencies.
The DEA identifies him as its second-highest-paid informant, but has
not identified the highest-paid.

He is one of thousands of informants who work for various law
enforcement agencies. Government and defense sources agree that many
have far worse criminal records than Chambers'.

The DEA generally pays $20 million or more a year to informants. Last
fiscal year it paid out $19.2 million. Informants also sometimes share
in hundreds of thousands of dollars in assets forfeited in
drug-related arrests and seizures, records show.

DEA agents said Chambers has earned their respect by working for more
than a decade in many different cities while maintaining a mastery of
street slang and gang dress.

And unlike many informants who offer their assistance in hopes of
receiving leniency on charges against them, Chambers freely
volunteered to become an informant.

"I have heard other DEA special agents and law enforcement personnel
call him the best at what he does," Parham said. "He put his own life
at risk on behalf of the American public to put serious violent
criminals in jail."

The Chronicle requested an interview with Chambers, and Parham agreed
to pass the request to the suspended informant. Chambers did not respond.

Parham said Chambers has worked on six Houston-area drug cases that
targeted violent drug offenders, but he would not elaborate. Payment
records show Houston DEA agents paid Chambers at least $10,360 from
1995 to 1997, and Galveston DEA records show he received another
$5,200 for work in 1995.

The Houston prostitution arrest was on April 28, 1998, after Chambers
offered an undercover police officer $10 for oral sex, according to a
Houston Police Department report.

Harris County court records show that DEA special agent Merritt Gibson
Jr. posted a $500 cash bond for Chambers' release.

Parham said the DEA reviewed the agent's action and determined that he
had been authorized by his supervisors to post the bail. Parham said
it was unusual but not unheard-of for an agent to intercede on behalf
of an informant.

Chambers later failed to appear at several court hearings, and bail
was raised to $10,000 but never posted. The case was dismissed at the
request of Harris County prosecutor Susan Davenport, who gave no
specific reason for the request in the court file.

Davenport said she does not recall the Chambers case or why it was
dismissed.

She said that no law enforcement agency has ever asked her to dismiss
charges against someone because he was an informant in an unrelated
case, and none intervened on Chambers' behalf.

The DEA has intervened, though, in other cases involving
Chambers.

In 1985, special agent Roy Shurn asked a Kentucky prosecutor to recall
outstanding warrants against Chambers, saying in a letter that he had
been "significantly valuable" as an informant.

Warrants had been issued for Chambers when he failed to appear in
Kentucky court on charges of forging a false name on an $12,297 auto
loan, and issuing a false financial statement after failing to pay a
$1,555 Kentucky jewelry bill. The charges eventually were dismissed.

When first arrested on the charges, court records show, Chambers
claimed in a sworn affidavit that he was indigent and unable to post
bond. But DEA records show that he had been paid several thousand
dollars by DEA that year.

Chambers also failed for six years to pay income taxes while earning
at least $549,000, according to income tax and DEA records disclosed
by prosecutors in a Louisiana drug trial. He later filed the
delinquent tax returns. For 1991, he reported $5,331 in unemployment
payments and filed for a $13.73 tax refund. He failed to report more
than $140,000 paid to him by DEA that year.

Defense attorneys contend that the Chambers story illustrates a
"win-at-all-cost" mentality among law officers and prosecutors. The
informants help anti-drug agencies tally favorable statistics, which
are useful in the quest for funding.

Critics charge that Chambers and other informants entrap defendants,
partly because of pay agreements ripe for corruption.

Frank Moya, a Colorado attorney, said Chambers offered to sell large
amounts of drugs at below-market prices.

"There was a wonderful built-in incentive to get anyone -- some very
reluctantly -- to come to the table with a giant wad of cash to take
part in these alleged fire sales of cocaine," Moya said. "Following
the arrests, Chambers would receive up to 25 percent of the money."

Moya's client, Kenneth Coleman, was one of 10 defendants caught in a
1995 sting operation by the DEA and Aurora, Colo., Police Department,
in which Chambers was selling fake cocaine. Coleman had just won a
$16,000 settlement in a worker's compensation case and was enticed by
the cut-rate cocaine sale.

"The cops and DEA couldn't find any drug dealers so they had to become
drug dealers and manufacture the crime," said Paul Grant, another of
Coleman's attorneys "There was no hint that Kenneth Coleman had been
involved recently in the sale of drugs."

Still, whatever the enticement or the specifics of individual cases,
prosecutors contend that defendants get in trouble because they take
the bait and agree to drug transactions.

Prosecutors also say that greater disclosure of Chambers' past would
have had little effect on most case outcomes.

So why lie about it? Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Wolfe of Los
Angeles speculated that the deception crucial to undercover work
breeds untruthfulness in informants like Chambers.

"Being undercover is very difficult because they are asked to lie
professionally and then not let that leak over into the courtroom and
other aspects of their lives," Wolfe said.